Culture File

The Comfort Zone: writer, critic and author of Dog Days, Emily LaBarge arrives to assert the unexpected magic of Cat Power's Jukebox, the 2008 covers album taking on Hank Williams, Billie Holiday and Joni Mitchell among others.

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Deep in the crate-crawling world of Conor Guilfoyle on mission is to save the lost recordings of the Irish jazz scene. The music of gum-chewing, with composer Andy Igamels, whose new album includes a measure of that mundane mastication; plus, a moment of pause as Patrick O'Laoghaire sails by with the latest of his island postcards.

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Deep in the crate-crawling world of Conor Guilfoyle on mission is to save the lost recordings of the Irish jazz scene. The music of gum-chewing, with composer Andy Igamels, whose new album includes a measure of that mundane mastication; plus, a moment of pause as Patrick O'Laoghaire sails by with the latest of his island postcards.

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Culture File Presents The Comfort Zone: artist and performer Day Magee comes to unpack the enduring value of C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, the 1942 epistolary satire of memos from a senior devil to his nephew, still green in the ways of evil. Inspo for a conversation that seeks to answer questions such as what is eternity? Is modern culture rubbish? How will heaven sort out the issue of remarried widows and widowers?

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Culture File Presents The Comfort Zone: artist and performer Day Magee comes to unpack the enduring value of C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, the 1942 epistolary satire of memos from a senior devil to his nephew, still green in the ways of evil. Inspo for a conversation that seeks to answer questions such as what is eternity? Is modern culture rubbish? How will heaven sort out the issue of remarried widows and widowers?

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The full interview with Meghan O'Gieblyn from this week's Culture File. 

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"We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will,” a thought from French mystic Simone Weil, inspires Meghan O’Gieblyn's new book, Will and Attention, a probing philosophical examination of addiction, recovery, beauty and grace. As the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir heads to Ireland for the NCH's ECM 2026 festival, their conductor and Estonian musical mainstay, Tõnu Kaljuste talks language, Arvo Pärt and the musicking of their homeland. Paddy Woodworth finds some space on The Naturalist's Bookshelf for Juilian Hoffeman's Irreplaceable.

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The Comfort Zone: dancer and choreographer, Favour "Official PAK" Odusola brings the choreographic art of Les Twins for appreciation, and also creates a Comfort Zone Choreo (seated) for celebrated non-dancer Colm Tóibín.

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An epic trilogy of documentaries dedicated to a cinematic biography of Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, premiered at this year's Venice Film Festival. Its director, Mariano Llinás and its main character, archivist and translator, Ernesto Montequin unfurl their completist life of Borges. An award winner at this year's Ars Electronica festival was SummitShare, a project from Zambia which uses AR and deep metadata to address the crisis in museums around contested cultural objects. One of the project's creators, Samba Yonga explains the problems around repatriation SummitShare promises to right.

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Musician, conceptual artist and regular Eno collaborator, Beatie Wolfe encourages The Comfort Zone crew to contemplate the not-quite-natural silence of an anechoic chamber.

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